Chapter Three · Sienna
CHAPTER THREE
SIENNA
I have a desk in the tack room. There is a window in it the size of a sheet of paper and a filing cabinet that does not open past the second drawer, and on the wall above the desk there is a county map with two hundred and six pins in it, and I put every one of those pins in myself.
At nine in the morning I had been awake for twenty-seven hours and I was doing the only thing that was going to hold me together, which was paperwork.
Trip had come out of surgery at six forty.
Chest tube, two units, a rib gone and a piece of the lower lobe with it.
The trauma resident who called me had that bright exhausted sound they get, and she said he had been within ten minutes of it, maybe less, and I said thank you and wrote the time down on my run sheet and put the phone facedown on the desk and sat there.
Then I filled out the state report. Then I filled out the county report. Then I filled out the controlled substance log, and the vehicle mileage form, and the incident narrative, and the second narrative, which is the same as the first one except it goes to a different email address.
Rae Tillman put a cup of coffee on my desk without saying anything and left again, which is the most affection Rae has shown any living person in the twenty years I have known her.
She came back four minutes later and stood in the door with her arms crossed.
“Boyle’s out there telling everybody about the needle.”
“He did good work last night.”
“He’s twenty-four and he’s never seen you do that.” She looked at the wall over my head. “He’s also telling everybody the vice president of the Copperheads carried the foot end of your cot up out of a ditch and said yes ma’am to you.”
“He said all right.”
“That’s a distinction you’re making at nine in the morning after twenty-seven hours.”
I put my pen down.
Rae has worked in this county since before I could drive.
She sat in the second row at my mother’s funeral.
She knows exactly what I was to Cutter Reeves when I was twenty-six and exactly what happened in the spring I turned twenty-seven, because everybody within forty miles of the Gap knows it, and that is the price of the mountains and there is no way to get out of paying it.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to ask if you’d eaten,” Rae said, and went back out to the bay, and about two minutes later a sleeve of crackers came sliding across my desk from the doorway without any hand attached to it.
At ten thirty I went out to the bay and looked at Medic 1.
It sat there with its nose to the wall and its hood up and a piece of cardboard on the floor underneath it, in the exact spot it had been sitting in for six days.
It is a 2014 with two hundred and ninety thousand miles and a chassis that has been welded twice.
The fuel pump was in a box on the workbench where it had been since Tuesday, because the box had been delivered to the county garage and the county garage had signed for it and the county garage cannot install it without a work order, and the work order requires a purchasing officer’s signature, and Dale Prosser retired on the ninth of March after thirty-one years and the county has not replaced him.
I had written four emails about it. I had made nine phone calls about it.
I had stood up in a public meeting in May and said, into a microphone, that at some point in the next year there was going to be a bad wreck on 60 and a bad call in Wilkes Ford at the same hour, and that when that happened I would have one truck, and that whoever came second was going to wait forty minutes for a mutual aid rig out of the next county.
The board had thanked me for my comments. There is a recording of it.
I stood in the bay with my hands in my back pockets and I looked at a piece of cardboard on a concrete floor and I thought about a boy in a ditch on Route 11.
If the second call had come in last night, that is what I would have had. One truck, already gone, already forty-one minutes north.
That was still true this morning.
That was going to be true tomorrow.
Preston Vogel came at a quarter past eleven.
He is fifty-five and he wears a quarter zip pullover with the county seal on the chest, and he has been supervisor for the Blackthorn district for three terms, and I want to be fair to him because unfairness is easy: he is not a stupid man and he is not a corrupt one, so far as I have ever seen.
He is a man with a district that is losing three hundred people a year and no money and no leverage, and he has learned that the only way to survive that job is to be pleased about things.
He was very pleased today. I could see it on him from the door.
“Sienna. I heard about last night.”
“Trip Odom’s out of surgery.”
“That’s a Copperhead boy.”
“He’s a twenty-three year old with one lung working,” I said. “Yes, he’s a Copperhead.”
He let that go by, which he is good at.
“I want to talk about the substation.”
I did not sit down, so he did not either, and we stood in the tack room under the map.
Here is the substation, and I want it on the record that I asked for it first, four years ago, in writing.
The northern half of this county is thirty-five minutes from this barn on a good day.
There is no good day between November and March.
Wilkes Ford, Ammons Creek, the whole north end of Route 11, all of it is a coin flip, and the fix is not complicated and it is not new.
You put a bay and a bunk room and a rig at the top of the county and you cut that thirty-five minutes to nine.
It costs about one point two million to build and about four hundred thousand a year to staff, and Blackthorn County does not have four hundred thousand dollars and has not had it since the mill closed.
“We have a partner,” Vogel said.
“We have a what.”
“A private sector partner. Interested in a public safety investment in the county.” He was rocking a little on his heels. “Sienna, they are talking about the whole thing. The building. The truck. Three years of staffing up front.”
“Who.”
“Kesterly Logistics. Out of Roanoke. They took over the old Renner terminal down at Wythe after the indictment, and they’ve been putting money up and down this corridor since spring. Ball fields in Smyth. A fire pumper up in Rockbridge.”
He said it the way you would say the name of a doctor who had good news.
“What do they want,” I said.
“Want.”
“Preston. Nobody puts one point two million dollars into a county with eleven thousand people in it because they like the mountains. What do they want.”
“They want,” he said, and he had this ready, and that was the part I did not like, “a community they can hire out of. They want a corridor that isn’t hostile to them.
They want their name on a building.” He spread his hands.
“That’s it. That’s the whole thing. They put their logo on the bay door and you get a rig at the north end of this county for the first time in the history of it. ”
And God help me, I stood there and I wanted it.
I want people to understand that. I have been doing this for eleven years and I have a map with two hundred and six pins in it and I know the name of every person in twelve of those pins, and about half of them would be alive if there had been a truck nine minutes away instead of thirty-five.
So when a man in a quarter zip stands in my tack room and offers me nine minutes, my first feeling is not suspicion.
My first feeling is relief, and it comes up so fast and so hot it makes my eyes sting.
“Send me what they sent you,” I said.
“There’s a dinner. Next month, at the Wythe terminal. Mr. Renner would like to meet the people who’d actually be running it.”
“Send me the documents, Preston.”
He sent them at two. I read them at four, after the second call of the day, which was a diabetic in Ammons Creek who was fine.
They were good documents. That was the first thing.
They were better than any document that has ever crossed my desk from the state, better than the grant packets, better than anything the county has ever produced.
There was a site rendering. There was a staffing model that was actually correct, with two full time medics and a part time relief position, which meant somebody had talked to somebody who had done this job.
Page fourteen had the site options on it. Three of them.
Two of them were parcels I would have picked myself.
The third was a fourteen acre lot on the east side of Route 11 at mile marker 178, which is nowhere.
It is a gravel turnaround, an old scale house, and a stand of pine.
It is twelve minutes further from Wilkes Ford than either of the other two.
There is no water to it and no three phase power and there is nothing there at all except that it sits directly on the northbound side of the interstate access.
And that was the option with the star beside it.
I looked at that for a while.
Then I did the thing I do when I cannot make a shape out of something, which is stop looking at the thing and go look at the data.
We run everything through the state reporting system, which is slow and ugly and complete.
Every call, every response time, every drug administered, every disposition.
I pulled the last ninety days for the whole county and put it in a spreadsheet, and then I filtered it the way I have filtered it once a quarter for four years, because I am the one who has to stand up at the board meeting and say the number out loud.
Overdose calls. Suspected opioid. Naloxone administered.
Ninety days: fifty-one.
I looked at that for a second before I did the comparison, because I wanted to be sure I was reading my own filter right and not just tired.
Fifty-one calls in ninety days in a county of eleven thousand people.
That is one every other day. That is one in every ten calls we run, in a system that runs about five hundred a year total.
Then I pulled the same quarter from the year before.
Nineteen.
I sat back.
That number is a bad number and I already knew it was a bad number, because I have been to all fifty-one of them. It is not a surprise. It is grief in a spreadsheet.
But I have looked at this number every quarter for four years, and there is a shape to it that I know as well as I know the road to Wilkes Ford.
Overdose calls in this county cluster. They cluster around three or four houses and a couple of trailers and one apartment building in the Gap, and they cluster on the first and the third of the month, and they cluster at night, and every single one of those things is true because addiction is a local and domestic and predictable disaster and I hate that I know that.
So I plotted the fifty-one.
And they were not in the houses.
Sixteen of them were on the road. Not in a residence, not in a trailer, not in the apartment building on Front Street. On the shoulder, at a turnaround, in a car at a pull off. Sixteen out of fifty-one, when the four year average for that category is under two.
And they were not on the first and the third.
They were on the eighth, the ninth, the twenty second, and the twenty third. Four times in ninety days, in pairs, forty-eight hour windows, and inside each window the calls came in a line up the county from south to north like somebody dragging a finger up the map.
I stopped breathing for a second.
Then I got up and got the county map off the wall, the paper one, and put it flat on the desk and started marking the sixteen with a pencil, because I did not trust the screen and because my hands wanted something to do.
They landed in five places.
Five pull offs on Route 11 and its access, five clusters, three and four calls apiece, and the first of them was the gravel turnaround at mile marker 171, where I had knelt in the mud at two o’clock that morning with my hand inside a boy’s chest.
The last of them was mile marker 178.
I sat down in the chair with the pencil still in my hand.
Somewhere out on 60 a truck went by and the window rattled in the frame, and the smell of sixty year old milk came up out of the concrete the way it does when the weather turns.
I looked at the pencil marks. I looked at the piece of paper with the star beside option three.
I thought about a man with a rifle lying in wet pine needles above a gravel turnaround, and about how strange it was that of all the empty pull offs on all the empty miles of that road, he had chosen the one I could have put a pin in from memory.
Then I did the only genuinely stupid thing I did that day.
I picked up my phone and I typed a message to a number I had not used in ten years, and it said, *Which one of the five did they shoot him at,* and my thumb went and sat on the send arrow and stayed there long enough for the screen to go dark.
I deleted it letter by letter. I have never in my life been able to delete a thing all at once.
Then I got my keys, because the tones were going, and there is always another call.